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A couple of days ago I wrote that to kick off 2018 I'd be posting about my crypto portfolio: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@davidpakman/welcome-to-2018-my-cryptocurrency-portfolio

I'll be posting about each currency I hold in the order I took positions in them. Here are the posts so far:

1. Bitcoin (BTC): https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@davidpakman/my-crypto-portfolio-day-1-bitcoin
2. Ethereum (ETH): https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@davidpakman/my-crypto-portfolio-coin-2-ethereum-eth

Today, I'll talk about the third crypto I bought, Litecoin (LTC). As with BTC and ETH, this was my third and (initially) last "major" coin, particularly at the time, before moving into the smaller, lower market cap coins.

LTC is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, and like with many other coins, it has no centralized authority. Interestingly, in terms of underlying technology, it has many similarities to Bitcoin.

As of today, LTC is 8th in terms of market cap, as per coinmarketcap.com

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Unless necessary due to limited trading pairs, I much prefer moving currency around in LTC over BTC and ETH, both for reasons of transaction fees and speed. That relates to one of the advantages of LTC over BTC, which is that the LTC infrastructure looks to process a "block" every two and a half minutes, compared to 10 minutes per block with BTC.

From a mining perspective, LTC's algorithm makes it so that mining is more complex and expensive, although the technical details of this start to exceed my knowledge.

Although this is controversial, and debatable, there is a case to be made that LTC is less "politically tainted" than BTC, although there's also a case to be made that the reason there's less controversy around LTC is simply that it's smaller and less held than BTC.

Currently, LTC represents about 17% of my total crypto holdings. This is higher than my individual holdings both BTC and ETH, and it's because my entry price to LTC was more favorable than the other cryptos.

What are your thoughts about LTC?

Tomorrow, my fourth crypto purchase: NEO, and its often under-appreciated cousin, GAS